On the Ground: The mayor of one small town in India proves communism isn’t dead yet

Reporting from Siliguri, India —  The mercury surged toward 104 degrees at noon. Intensity drained from the busy streets. Pedestrians sought refuge at sidewalk juice stalls, where vendors ordered extra ice.

Yet as the town of Siliguri in eastern India baked, its 66-year-old mayor remained unperturbed.

Asok Bhattacharya walked into his party office in mid-afternoon after a hectic first half of the day, but he seemed buoyant as he brushed past two reporters who were waiting to meet him. His personal assistant said he was heading straight into a meeting with party workers.

An hour later, clad in a long cotton kurta and loose-fitting trousers, a smiling Bhattacharya returned, greeting visitors inside a stifling room with no air conditioner and a lone ceiling fan revolving reluctantly overhead.

“I will not be able to give you too much time,” he said, apologizing. He had to leave for an event to launch his latest book, a treatise on climate change.

If Bhattacharya keeps a busy schedule, it is because he has little choice. He is one of the last standard-bearers of India’s once-influential Communist Party.

Siliguri, a town of about half a million people, is located in a tea-growing region of the Indian state of West Bengal, where miles of lush green gardens spread across the horizon. Vendors say the tea grown in these fields is rare and hard to find in the rest of India. The same could be said for communist office-holders in India.

Siliguri is one of the last bastions of what is officially known as the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in West Bengal. (There is also a Marxist-Leninist branch of the party, which is more extreme.) In recent state elections, while his party suffered defeats across West Bengal, Bhattacharya easily won a seat to the state assembly. He won the mayoralty of Siliguri last year.

During the high-water mark of India’s communists, the party ruled West Bengal for 34 years before being ousted in 2011 — a loss that reportedly left Bhattacharya in tears. In a country that embraced central planning and elaborate welfare schemes in the decades after independence in 1947, socialist philosophies were so in vogue that Marx, Lenin and Stalin once were popular names for babies.

But the world has changed. Communism fell in Eastern Europe. China became a bastion of capitalism (under the Communist Party banner). Cuba’s communists are shedding their long opposition to the United States, if not their ideology. And in India, the Communist Party now retains a significant presence in just two states.

Yet Bhattacharya’s political isolation has not dimmed his work ethic. He meets visitors without appointment. Journalists can request interviews with a simple text message.

“I am just a local leader,” the bespectacled and mustachioed Bhattacharya said inside the party’s gray, two-story offices. “We are here to serve people. After becoming ministers, politicians tend to forget that.”

Bhattacharya made a mark as chairman of the local municipality in 1988 by transforming Siliguri into a modern township. In 1991, he was elevated to cabinet minister in the communist-led state government, serving for 20 years until the party was swept out of power.

Rival parties and political pundits dismiss the communists as relics. Yet Bhattacharya invokes old bromides, saying Marxism is “still the most popular -ism in the world” and “left is always right.”

He criticizes the liberalization policies that have made India the world’s fastest-growing major economy but have failed to solve an unemployment crisis. And he believes India is drifting toward majoritarianism under the stewardship of the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party, which has close ties to Hindu nationalist groups.

Still, his brand of communism is hardly doctrinaire. He has pushed growth in the private sector, including finance, transportation and small industry. The result has been an overall increase in non-agricultural jobs.

One glaring indication of the communists’ decline in India is the low representation of youth. In 1968, it was an 18-year-old Bhattacharya, mesmerized by the romanticism of communist revolution, who joined the party along with many idealists his age. Now, most prominent leaders of the party are in their 60s.

“We need to speak to the youngsters in their language,” Bhattacharya said. “But the neoliberal policies have driven youngsters away from politics by making them materialist.”

Bhattacharya concluded the 25-minute conversation with an invitation to the launch of his new Bengali-language book across the street. He has written six others on various regional ethnic groups.

The event was a low-key affair. He spoke about his book, whose title roughly translates to “Urban Development and Climate Change.” About 50 invitees were present, listening politely. In his remarks, he focused on the perils of neoliberal economic policies and the persistent exploitation of the poor in India.

When it was over, without any bodyguards, he walked casually back toward the party offices with the air of a common man approaching his home.

Parth M.N. is a special correspondent.